Walking in the footsteps of giants – and gerbils | Elsa Panciroli

From hopping Cretaceous desert mammals, to muddy Scottish sauropods, fossil footprints reveal more than you might expect about extinct life

Trekking through damp woodlands in the Scottish Highlands, I pause and look down at my feet. On a thread-like deer trail on a steep hillside, animal footprints have been pressed into a hollow of mud. I reach into my backpack and take out a battered field guide. I identify the imprints as those of a pine marten; an elusive UK carnivore that I'm told is partial to eating small rodents, eggs, insects" and peanut butter if there are generous humans around. With luck, I may see the trackmaker itself. I tread quietly onward through the forest.

For palaeontologists, identifying the makers of a fossil footprint is not so simple. There are no handy laminated field guides matching dinosaur species to their tracks, or ancient insects to their burrows. The only way to link a fossil animal directly to its imprints is to find it, literally, dead in its tracks.